Toward a general framework for how environmental change affects herbivore-plant interactions

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Our society relies on goods and services produced by ecological systems. These include carbon sequestration, plant growth and seafood production. One major challenge facing scientists today is to understand why these functions vary from place to place, and to anticipate how they might change in the future with climate change. Though ecological systems are highly complex, and this complexity is important to understand, in my research I take the approach that we can understand a substantial amount of ecological change by focusing on very simple, general effects of environmental temperature on the rates and outcomes of ecological processes. Environmental temperature affects fundamental biological processes in general ways. We can use this general effect of temperature to project how complex ecological systems respond to environmental variation in temperature, as occurs with season, latitude or global climate change. Evidence suggests that warming strengthens the impacts of herbivores on plants, whether the herbivores are insects or fish or zooplankton, and I propose to use experiments and theory to test the effects of small increases in temperature on the effect of herbivores on plants. My research group will test the effects of warming on planktonic food webs, and use models to apply our experimental findings to large-scale natural systems that support fish production, carbon sequestration and biodiversity in the world's oceans. My group's research will produce evidence and models that will directly inform projections of how climate change affects ecosystems. This kind of information represents a frontier of science, and was lacking in the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the authoritative body of climate change science and impacts. Our work will therefore contribute to a broader understanding of ecological systems now and in the future.